Woman’s wisdom tooth turned tongue black, left her in coma

Caitlin Alsop had been enjoying a “quiet dinner” with friends when her life, very suddenly, turned upside down.

In the days prior, the 27-year-old Australian woman had felt “a bit” under the weather – but after consulting her doctor, he was convinced she simply had the flu.

“And so I just took it really easy. On the Saturday I was with my friends having a quiet dinner and it felt [all of a sudden] like I had bitten my tongue,” Alsop recalled in an interview with SEEN TV.

Within a matter of hours, however, her tongue “was quite swollen, and my airway started to close a little bit.”

“It was so difficult to breathe, and I couldn’t actually talk,” Alsop said.

Upon arrival at hospital, medics first suspected she was in anaphylaxis — a severe allergic reaction.

“There was this really shallow breathlessness feeling, and it’s really quite a feeling of malaise. Feeling sick, and just feeling exhausted,” Alsop said.

“But I had had nothing [out of the ordinary to eat]. I’d had a vegan burger.”

Doctors administered her with adrenaline and steroids – but Alsop’s condition continued to “rapidly” deteriorate.

“I kept passing in and out of consciousness,” she said.

“My skin was red and blue, and actually peeling off. My mum describes it as being like a microwave that was just burning from the inside out,” she said.

“And then my tongue went black. And that was where there were talks of amputation …[They were] trying to figure out what was going on. And I am so grateful to the doctors and nurses and the whole medical team who did save my life, because I was a mystery for quite a while.

“[Finally] there was an anaesthetist who actually said, ‘We don’t know what it is, but it could be Ludwig’s Angina.’”

The rare floor-of-mouth infection is caused by a trapped wisdom tooth that, in Alsop’s case, led to sepsis – the life-threatening response to an infection that can lead to organ failure.

“The plot twist with me here is that I had absolutely no pain, no symptoms, no issues with my teeth whatsoever,” she added.

“It was just that my tooth – my wisdom tooth – was impacted and infected in my jaw. And that had pretty much caused me to nearly die.”

Doctors needed to “comatose me and paralyze me because I really needed to be completely sedated,” Alsop said, and even considered amputating her tongue.

“So knock you out, put you on life support because they need to preserve your oxygen, they need to preserve your airways,” she said.

“And they also need to make sure that your organs don’t start shutting down, which is the biggest concern of sepsis and why it’s such a medical emergency.”

Ultimately, she pulled through – and when she woke from her coma, Alsop said she’d “never felt … so grateful to be alive”.

“I can’t even explain it – to feel that you’re able to breathe. You’re able to see. You’re able to hear. You know, everything feels like a child again. It’s like being born again, in a way,” she explained.

“I was so, so grateful to be here and to get that second chance at life.”

Alsop is now passionate about raising awareness about sepsis, “because an infection can happen to anybody”, prompting her to launch the #comatoconfidence moment.

“This is the story of millions of people out there and the difference that we can make when we do work together,” she said.

“I speak to the most incredible people who’ve really had their lives impacted by sepsis, or lost someone to sepsis. And it’s always the same words. I just wish we knew. I wish we knew it sooner.”